Acceptance

It is winter in Area X. A new team embarks across the border on a mission to find a member of a previous expedition who may have been left behind. As they press deeper into the unknown, navigating new terrain and new challenges, the threat to the outside world becomes more daunting.

The denouement of this Southern Reach was as to be expected in a series where the atmosphere was the important part. Not much wrapping up of the story nor is there any obvious analogies. A pretty standardized look at at Humans and their interactions with the environment as well as the ubiquitous evil spy agency. Overall the trilogy was not t worth it for me but I would recommend reading Book 2 first, then 1 then 3 if you read it. Reading Authority first at least makes Annihilation less illogical about how the exploration missions inside Area X are conceived and executed.

It's a good book, wraps up the series well. Life--and Area X and its effects--go on, of course, but as far as the literary (and most literate) series is concerned, Southern Reach is "done." And so, too, are the remaining characters. At least, as we have known them...

I was left wanting...not something more--but certainly something ELSE, especially about the biggest revelation of all (if you're into the series, then you know what THAT revelation is.) So, a bit of a disappointment--although certainly appreciate the author's writing skill.

Unlike the first two instalments, much less internal maundering and, instead, lots of external "action."

Vandermeer's third book of his Southern Reach trilogy is a fitting end to his unique story. I found myself flying through the chapters desperate to search for clues to the mystery and to discover what becomes of the four central characters. The ending left me mostly satisfied, but like other great works of SciFi, left me with a taste of wanting more.

Seriously ... you won't get the time spent reading this series back. There are simply so many better, thought-provoking and/or more entertaining books out there to read. If you must, stop at the first book or just watch its film adaptation.

The third novel in the Southern Reach Trilogy is easily the worst. I enjoyed the first novella, which was really short, but this third installment was all filler. If you take away the verbose description all that remains is about 50 pages of actual action. That makes for a very boring novel. This one is a full length novel, not a short novella like the previous two. It is told over four different time periods by four different people/viewpoints. What caused Area X? A biosphere that was demolished in space that catapulted into Earth's atmosphere and down into the lighthouse's four ton lens which was later drilled out by a military science dweeb named Henry to recreate itself here on Earth. Soooo disappointing and anticlimactic. I won't be reading any more Van Der Meer novels.

No solid ending here, which disappoints a bit. However, I loved how well this book intertwined with the storylines of the preceding two. A tempo that lulls you into a false sense of security even when you know something creepy it inevitably going to happen, and does.

The very fragmentation of this third in the trilogy is deliberate, and in itself completely unsettling - point of view, narration, timeframe, how quickly time passes, how reliable a narrator might be, even the very use of language and perception - nothing is stable when the reader desperately wants it to be so. VanderMeer is taking the genre to a different level, in all three books: Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. Horror does not need to explain itself, but as he shows, can be even more effective if it feeds your imagination and makes it hungry for more explanation than will ever be forthcoming.

I loved the characters. Each character's story adds a different piece to the puzzle that is Area X. The environmentalist theme is timely. The story is deliciously mysterious, ambiguous, and open to interpretation.